First time using crypto pay for payment in an AI scenario. Normally, I use http://openrouter.ai for LLM API call services. AI and crypto are still merging continuously, and this feels like a real and practical use case. But I’m not sure about the proportion of crypto pay usage on OpenRouter. OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy. Alex Atallah, one of the co-founders and former CTO of OpenSea (he left at a good time, catching the AI wave—OpenRouter should be considered a top player in LLM routing), later shifted to building the AI platform OpenRouter. Services provided by OpenRouter: Unified API aggregation and billing. It offers a unified API interface, allowing developers to call hundreds of different LLMs (large language models) with a single key, without needing to integrate each provider separately. OpenRouter will: standardize the access methods for multiple models; dynamically route requests to the appropriate model based on price, latency, etc.; and simplify billing and contract management. OpenRouter doesn’t significantly mark up the pricing of the models themselves but charges customers about a 5% commission on inference costs (i.e., usage fees for inference). OpenRouter supports cryptocurrency payments (e.g., USDC) for topping up account credits. When using crypto pay, the transaction fee is 5%. When paying with a wallet, there are three chains to choose from, all within the Ethereum ecosystem. The default recommendation is Base (which I used), Polygon, and Ethereum mainnet. The overall experience was pretty smooth.